Sounds of Loving

Passionate lovers know that love-making can be noisy business. Vocalizing pleasure during sex is an essential part of love-making. Despite the reality that the oooh’s and aaaah’s of sex form the basis for many jokes, the following explores why these sounds of love are so vital.

For sex to be good, partners must be relaxed. To get deeply relaxed, proper breathing is necessary. This is demonstrated in various spiritual disciplines including yoga where deep breathing is encouraged to obtain deeply relaxed meditative states. Deep breathing in sex also aids partners, if relaxed, in being more conscious of their body-sensations. Expressing pleasure in sounds magnifies the pleasure, making a sexual experience fuller. Vocalizing pleasure forces a partner to breathe more deeply. In order to sing well, professional singers are trained to breathe deeply. Lovers, too, must breathe deeply to sing well the songs of pleasure and love. Sexual songs help lovers to lose themselves in that delicious sexual trance that is potential only in good sex. Being self-conscious is uncomfortable. When having fun, we have forgotten about ourselves…this is true in good sex as well.

Sexual pleasure and arousal are dependent upon awakened energy in the body, evidenced by heat in our sex parts once love-making begins. If the sexual energy is confined to our sex-parts, our excitement and pleasure will be limited. By vocalizing the excitement and pleasure in sounds, sexual energy is drawn from confined physical locations, to flow all around our bodies, with the effect of producing a larger, full-bodied arousal instead of a pelvic-only excitement.

Expressing our pleasure in sound is a form of communication which allows an exchange between partners of very important sexual information. A partner learns from the other’s sounds about the effectiveness of his or her pleasuring efforts and provides indirect instructions about what works and what doesn’t. Listening carefully to our partner’s song guides us in our creative endeavor to drive him or her crazy in ever-new and successful ways.

Lovers influence each other in an ever deepening spiral of excitement. As love-making builds in intensity, the song lovers sing contributes to the building of passion. As one partner voices pleasure, the other, in reaction, grows more excited to the first partner’s sexy sounds. If well-expressed, the excitement then turns-on the second partner even more, in a deepening cyclical pattern. By being generous with the vocal expression of pleasure, we generously offer ourselves and our excitement as a gift to our lover.

Nothing comes without a cost and singing the song of pleasure too has costs. Lovers know all too well, that expressing oneself vocally threatens the privacy which silence protects; something that a sound-screen of music may preserve. Our song is as unique as we are; thus expressing it shares our deeper self with our lover. For some this feels too vulnerable and therefore too revealing. Overcoming such a fear is an opportunity for growth, challenged by expressing ourselves with bravado. Lovers who withhold their song, and who are also holding their breath, miss out. Silent lovers dampen their own pleasure while failing to fully relax; this robs the other of shared excitement and the feelings of satisfaction that come from being a good lover. Not much turns a lover on more than a highly excited partner. The sounds of love form a non-verbal conversation which elicits the excitement of openness and intense, shared sexual pleasure. Andrew Aaron is a sex and relationship therapist who practices in the New Bedford Seaport.